In the run up to our production of The Great Middlemarch Mystery in April, we spoke with co-writer Professor Ruth Livesey about what it’s been like to adapt such a well-known classic into an immersive theatre script. We discussed the positive and negative powers of community, George Eliot’s artistic vision, and how the pandemic has altered our approach to risk.

Photo of Josephine Burton (left) and Ruth Livesey (right) at the Middlemarch R&D, April 2021

Can you give a brief overview of your involvement in The Great Middlemarch Mystery?

In 2019 I got some funding to explore the legacies and afterlife of George Eliot in what was her bicentenary year. I was quite frustrated at the time, because it was 200 years since Eliot was born, and there was no evidence of anyone staging her work or showing any of her films. I thought it was a huge shame that there was no visible or sharable adaptation of her fantastic works. I was then introduced to Josephine as she was planning a Dash Arts Café at Warwick Arts Centre. So, we met for a coffee and ended up waving our hands around and asking “what if?”.

You see, my project at the time was about middleness in George Eliot’s fiction; how it’s not about great heroes or heroines but it’s about the everyday. So, we started playing around with ideas of what Middlemarch would be like from the minor characters point of view and how we could think about it as an immersive experience, which is very true to the form of the novel. At first, Josephine and I thought the show was going to be much more improvisational, but with our early workshops we realised we wanted more of George Eliot’s actual words in the narrative, so we started co-writing the script. I’ve had a full searchable digital text of Middlemarch that allows me to directly lift a lot of the dialogue out to play with. Now we have a script of Middlemarch but ours is set, like the novel, 40 years before it was written, in the 1980s.

Why do you think it’s important to revisit the story of Middlemarch? How is it relevant to today's society and the landscape of the Midlands in the 80s?

George Eliot was looking back to a time 40 years before, where there had been some huge social, political and technological changes. She was in the middle of the railway age, which altered the relationship between London and the rest of England, and the progression of communication that was influenced by the invention of the Telegraph and the Penny Post. How different parts of the county related to each other had changed massively and, to me, that spoke so clearly to where we are now. Looking back to the 1980s and the digital transformation, the ways we communicate has changed so much since then.

The other parallel that became apparent was the pandemic; one of the huge themes of Middlemarch is the opening of the new hospital designed for contagious fevers. In the story, we see a household go into lockdown due to a contagious fever and we’ve played around with the subsequent love affair between Rosamond and doctor Lydgate, so there’s lots of exploration of touch and intimacy in the script.

Middlemarch explores the idea of provincialism, could you talk a bit about what that is and how it’s explored in this production?

Yes, the subtitle of the book is ‘A Study of Provincial Life’ and the initial project I started working on in 2019 was thinking about this idea of provincialism. It was a term that had fallen out of use for many years, but it did start to pop up again in the Brexit debate. I was really interested in what the term meant - really it means anywhere that’s not the city or metropolis, but with British culture in particular it comes with a cultural snobbery, referring to those who are unfashionable or a bit behind, which is really apparent in the novel.

But for me, Eliot explores provincialism by weighing up the pros and cons of what it is to be part of a community. This is something we wanted to preserve as part of our production because Eliot’s own experience of this does resonate in her novels; she grew up in this small town of Nuneaton, where she loved that sense of early belonging, but also disliked being the odd one out. She was the super smart woman who wasn’t necessarily seen as marriage material. She was always getting into trouble and knew that her religious beliefs, as well as her belief of pursuing an intellectual life, were never going to sit comfortably with her family’s expectations of what a respectable woman should do.

In her work you see this discomfort; you see how fun it can be to belong in a group of people who’ve known each other since they were at school but you also see how community can exclude people. We didn’t want to gloss over how toxic it can be when a community shuns you, but we did want to end with the more positive side of what a community can achieve.

Photo of Ruth (middle) at the Middlemarch R&D, April 2021

Following on from the idea of provincialism, why is it important to have this site-specific work, set in central Coventry, across four different locations? Does it represent a different sort of Englishness?

Yeah, I think that’s part of it. Middlemarch is a very lightly fictionalised version of Coventry in the 1820s-30s. George Eliot was at school in the town and she lived there for a good ten years in her 20s too, so she knew the town really intimately. Middlemarch represents Coventry as well as a stand in for any middle England small town.

It’s too easy to suggest that Eliot’s ideas and her intellectual life only happened when she left Coventry and came to London. There was a really vibrant community of thought and ideas going on in Coventry in the 1800s, as there is now. Thanks to working with Dash’s fantastic team and all the local community groups, we’ll be able to showcase that fact.

Everywhere has a culture and this is what Eliot’s work demonstrated. She was always making readers stand in other people’s shoes and see the world from their point of view. She argued that you shouldn’t diminish or make grotesque stereotypes from other people’s experiences, but that they were really rich and colourful. I think that honouring everybody's experience and point of view is something that the production is really engaged with. Not just by focusing on the minor characters of Middlemarch, but by working with communities to channel their experience of Coventry in the 80s into the fabric of life that we’re weaving. It’s a very inclusive kind of vision and that was Eliot’s aim - that art should be about everybody’s experience.

You spoke earlier about the immersive nature of the show and how that relates to the form of the novel. In what ways is the novel immersive?

Eliot has a style of writing that has a very strong omniscient narrator who you can often feel telling you to do things, but there are moments in the narrative where you realise the narrator has slid you into the point of view of a character. Suddenly you’re seeing the world from the point of view of someone you really might not identify with at all. We see the whole first part of the novel from the point of view of the beautiful young 19-year-old Dorothea who’s entering into this disastrous marriage. Then, suddenly the narrator interrupts itself and says ‘but why always Dorothea? What is her husband’s point of view?’.

That’s the kind of experience we want to give people; we start with a narrator type voice but then once you’re in Middlemarch, you have certain choices to make about where you go, who you believe and what you pick up on. It’s that experience of self-questioning that the immersive experience will hopefully give our audiences, as well as lots of fun!

Photo of Ruth Livesey (right) and Josephine Burton (left) at the Warwick Arts Centre R&D, 2020

In the interview you did with Richard Ford, and you spoke about how Eliot was motivated to make the minutiae of everyday compelling. Was that something that you and Josephine were keen to emulate? How does that come across in the script?

It’s tricky because quite early on we realised that to give our audiences a journey and a motivation, we were going to focus on the murder, which does takes it a little bit beyond the everyday. When I’m talking about the production with colleagues and I say that we’re focusing on the murder they say ‘murder? Is there a murder in there?’ And there is, but it’s not melodramatic. We wanted to focus on the lack of villains and heroes. Yes, there are potential crimes committed here, but they’re not committed by some great villain. We have to come to understand people’s motivations and the very human scale of things which is the everydayness that we wanted to convey.

This also informed the mise-en-scene of the show – it’s not going to be a big Victorian, tea cups and crinolines thing because we didn’t want there to be a distance. So, by setting it in the 1980s we’ve removed that disconnect; we’re asking people to remember and to connect to their own memories. Which, again, is true to the mundane within Eliot’s work, I think.

What was it like to adapt such an amazing massive novel into an immersive theatre script?

Completely crazy! But very freeing. I’ve been thinking about the things I’ve done this year and there is something about the post covid landscape that encourages the feeling of go big or go home, in relation to risk. We’ve learned to live with risk in such different ways. It is quite high risk to play around with one of the most venerated texts in the European canon, but on the other hand, we hope to bring Eliot to new audiences in ways that feel quite true to her mission as an artist.

She hated adaptations of her work and really tried to restrict conventional stage adaptations. She’s a very infrequently adapted author because she wanted people to engage with the experience of the book, so by keeping as many of Eliot’s words in the script as we can, our adaptation does have a truth to it that you couldn’t get in a more conventional adaptation. It has felt truly like a creative and playful partnership with Josephine and the whole team at Dash. If we can share a tiny bit of that with others then that’s a great thing.

Photo of Joan Walker at the Middlemarch script read through, Feb 2022

Which character are you most excited to see brought to life and why?

Mrs Bulstrode is the moral compass of the novel in some ways; she’s completely worldly and strangely pious, so her narrative arc is going to be really important. And I think the actor playing Mrs Bulstrode is brilliantly cast and it will be really great to see how she can carry that story beyond the words of the text.

How has seeing the actors at the read through informed your final revisions of the script?

They picked up what worked best with the original rhythms of Eliot’s dialogue, which has really helped me when editing the script. It’s also helpful when thinking about where we need to trim some of those 19th century references, while keeping the truth and authenticity of their characterisation through the speech that Eliot wrote. And it was really pleasing to see that it was those original bits that they got really quickly. It was amazing and a real privilege to watch.

Do you think audiences ought to be familiar with Eliot or the story in order to watch this show?

Absolutely not, and that was absolutely our intent from the beginning. The Great Middlemarch Mystery is about bringing new people to encounter Eliot. One of the great barriers to good literature is that it comes with all this baggage, especially Eliot as her work is hugely intellectual and deeply challenging. I just want to throw all that out the window and invite people to try it, be a part of it, see how it feels. Because what it has to offer is too important to be stuck on the shelf in the library. People feeling like the book is not for the likes of them isn’t what Eliot wanted. She didn’t want the experience of art to be easy, experiencing great art should never be easy, but it shouldn’t be something that you think is inaccessible. By having this show on the streets of Coventry, it makes it that bit more accessible, which is really really crucial.

Book tickets for The Great Middlemarch Mystery here.

Ruth Livesey’s contribution to the project was supported by UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/V010786/1)